A veteran leader in the environmental movement, Carl Pope is the former executive director and chairman of the Sierra Club. He's now the principal advisor at Inside Straight Strategies, looking for the underlying economics that link sustainability and economic development.

He has served on the Boards of the California League of Conservation Voters, Public Voice, National Clean Air Coalition, California Common Cause, Public Interest Economics Inc, and Zero Population Growth. Mr. Pope is also the author of three books: Sahib, An American Misadventure in India; Hazardous Waste In American and co-author along with Paul Rauber Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress, which the New York Review of Books called "a splendidly fierce book."

Neither Paris nor Lyon is burning -- yet. But sweltering, roasting under 40oC (106oF) skies, they definitely are -- and the delegates gathering in Lyon to channel the climate-action potential of cities, states and provinces feel the heat. In addition to the weather, the World Summit on Climate and Territories...

The Republican reaction to Pope Francis's climate encyclical, juxtaposed to the Democratic congressional rebellion against President Obama on trade, suggest that climate and energy are powerfully disrupting the grid-locked orthodoxy which has dominated American politics for the last decade.

When Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi rose to speak against Fast Track Trade Authority for President Obama, she sealed the fate of last Friday's round of voting -- and signaled the beginning of something crucially important -- a fresh debate on the nature and purpose of trade diplomacy.

After first rejecting "fast-track authority" to prevent Congress from amending President Obama's pendingres Asian and European trade agreements,13 Senate Democrats change their votes Thursday. The Senators who flipped had obtained other concessions, on issues like the Export-Import Bank and currency manipulation - but tellingly most of the concessions...

Part of the genius behind the Goldman Environmental Prize is that it not only rewards inspiring individuals but spotlights communities and struggles that would otherwise remain off the global community's radar screen. The prize recipients this year -- the 25th -- were no exception. Few in the audience...

Harry Reid's announcement that he will not stand for reelection to the Senate from Nevada in 2016 is a major loss for the climate movement -- and yet another signal that the U.S. Senate is being transformed by today's bifurcated, parliamentary politics into an institution almost unrecognizably different from its...

A few weeks ago I posted two parts of a promised three-part series on the remaking of the electricity sector of the U.S. economy. Those posts outlined the flimsiness of the arguments being made against clean electricity by coal companies and incumbent utilities, and the overwhelming...

President Obama's veto this week of a Republican bill passed -- precisely so that he would veto it -- mandating the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline does, indeed, as former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg pointed out, serve as "a perfect symbol of Washington's dysfunction." Obama made...

The U.S. electricity sector will be unrecognizable in 20 years. How-- and how-- fast it changes will be a big factor in how large a price the world pay for having disrupted climate equilibrium - but it is not the climate threat that will drive the changes. Electricity is a...

The vicious coal industry/right-wing attack on President Obama's proposed Clean Power Rule is not fundamentally about the rule itself. Substantively, the proposal is simply the fulfillment of one of George W. Bush's 2000 campaign promises -- to clean up carbon pollution from power plants.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the...

COP20, the United Nations climate conference held here in Lima, Peru, was dramatically unlike its predecessors. It opened amid confidence that progress toward a major new agreement in Paris next year would continue -- and closed with a weak but formally adequate agreement that keeps the process rolling....

As the world gathers in Lima to discuss next year's climate deadline, a lot of focus is on the US-China climate agreement. While alone that deal has not paved a pathway for a meaningful global agreement all the way to Paris, if you detour through New Delhi something intriguing and...

This may be the shortest blog I've ever written. On Election Day, voters in a number of cities and counties voted on whether to severely restrict or ban oil and gas development -- the oil industry poured millions of dollars in an effort to avoid these restrictions. In...